Project By Jyotindra Jain and Jutta Jain-Neubauer
Orientalist Archives: Indo-British Painting in Colonial India (Company School Painting from the Swaraj Archive)
The defining facet of this exhibition is to contextualise the Company School paintings within the emergent Indo-British visual culture of the 18th and 19th centuries, largely reflecting an orientalist stance. With their exposure to new lessons in realism, local artists, patronised by the British settlers, evolved a hybrid stylistic idiom, marked by vestigial chiaroscuro, creating a menagerie of images depicting themes from Hindu mythology as well as stereotyped and exoticised Indian communities. The Company School developed a visual census of the people of India, typified by naivety and dramatisation with a tinge of sarcasm.
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